Rees "Chip" Lee

Education:

• MD, Stanford University, 1996
• Pediatric Pulmonology, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, 2005

Dr. Lee is a board-certified Pediatric Pulmonologist who completed his undergraduate and medical school training at Stanford University, pediatric residency at Naval Medical Center Portsmouth and his pediatric pulmonary fellowship at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.  In October 2021, he followed his wife Sally back to her hometown of Tucson, AZ, after she had been following him for 35 years to numerous duty stations while serving in the U.S. Navy.   He is a qualified Surface Warfare Officer with 5 years of at-sea experience as a Navigator and Communications Officer on destroyers prior to starting his medical career.  As a U.S. Navy medical officer, his assignments included Chair of the military’s largest tertiary care Pediatric Department in Portsmouth, Virginia; second-in-command of the hospital ship USNS COMFORT (T-AH 20); Commanding Officer of Naval Medical Research Unit Dayton, a medical research institute conducting aerospace and toxicology research; and, in his last duty assignment, he was the Force Surgeon of Naval Surface Force Atlantic overseeing the medical care of the 27,000 Sailors assigned to the surface ships of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet.  He has deployed multiple times to the Middle East, Afghanistan and Central/South America including an assignment as the Senior Medical Officer of the NATO Role 3 Trauma Hospital in Kandahar, Afghanistan.  Following his retirement from the Navy, Dr. Lee joined the University of Arizona as an Associate Professor in Pediatric Pulmonology and provides clinical care at Diamond Children’s Hospital and at the Children’s Clinics.  He loves to bike and kayak.  And despite spending much of his life at sea, Dr. Lee is happy to now just be a simple ‘Dirt Sailor’ living in the arid desert of Arizona.

Environmental research interests - Dr. Lee has an interest in indoor and outdoor air pollution impacts on respiratory health, particularly the health of children with chronic pulmonary diseases like asthma and cystic fibrosis.  He is currently active in conducting research with Tribal Nation colleagues as part of projects supported by the Southwest Environmental Health Sciences Center (SWEHSC).  He also has a long-standing experience in using large databases, such of the medical databases of the Department of Defense, for outcomes research on pulmonary diseases.